Daddy Ducky (or: How Steviepinhead Spent Mother's Day Weekend)

On the Friday evening leading into the Mother’s Day Weekend, my son Lars's friend Christine was in town visiting from NYC, where she’s a writer/reporter. The two of them very thoughtfully invited Celia and me to come over for dinner (to my own house!) for spaghetti. We brought red wine, beer, etc., and they did the cooking.

Once we arrived, I realized that it was--whew!--past due time to change the cat litter. Celia, for some reason (probably not wishing to be "abandoned" to the two younger people at the outset of the visit), insisted that she would do the cat litter chore, but I put my foot down. (I know, your reader-ly intuition is already going, “Dong, dong, dong! You should always listen to your girlfriend!”) Celia took herself out and down to the parking strip in front of my house, where I had long ago built a treated wood planter box. There she meant to just bask in the pleasant spring weather until I was done with litter duty and we could jointly socialize with the young folk.

Instead, as Celia was innocently sitting on the edge of the planter box, along came a peeping sound. At first she thought it was a bird flying overhead, and she craned her neck to try to spot it, but the peeping then turned out to be emanating from a three-inch high duckling, waddling its way through the grass of the parking strip, with no Mama Duck or string of babies anywhere in sight.

It was a cute mallard duckling, all down-covered, with a dark brown mohawk running from the base of the beak over the top of its head to the back of the neck, where the darker color merged with the dark brown coloration of its back. This darker brown was laid over an "undercoat" of yellowy-tan, which along the sides of the face, body, and belly. Two cool darker horizontal "racing stripes” ran back across the eyes to the back of the head in a thin Zorro/Lone Ranger-style mask. The duckling’s stubby winglets (more like down-covered arms with pointy fingerless ends) were also in the darker color. The little guy was not naked anywhere, except for beak and webbed feet, but was not yet starting to "fledge out" with full-blown feathers.

Of course, in an ideal world, you handle a little lost wild creature as little as possible, and try to re-unite it immediately with its own family or (in the case of ducklings) with another mama duck with little ones at the same stage of development.

By this time, I had rejoined Celia and discovered the ducky's plight. Unfortunately, our quick but thorough search of my north Seattle neighborhood that night yielded no sign of a mama with ducklings. My house is about four or five blocks uphill from the "Ship Canal" that runs from Lake Washington to Shilshole Bay on Puget Sound. After canvassing the neighborhood, we wandered on down to the canal, but saw only a group of two or three green-headed male mallards, and no signs of females or little 'uns.

Once we got back to the house, we immediately tried calling Seattle Animal Control and Washington Fish and Wildlife, but both had closed for the weekend at 5 pm, before we ever encountered the duckling. The Seattle Animal Control message made it clear that we were supposed to call the state Fish and Wildlife folks for cases of "immature wild animals," so we left a message with that office. We probably should have tried PAWS, too, but I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that they would also be closed for the weekend. In any event, Celia has had problems in the past with them being rather officious (oh, no, we can't accept a lost King County pet, we're located in Snohomish County, that sort of thing).

So the little duckling hung out in Celia's “pile” (spun polypro) vest pocket for the rest of the evening while we chatted and drank with the young folks for a couple of hours, before we headed back to her house. There we contrived a meal of some squished-up wetted bread, then tucked our duckling in for the night in a straw waste-basket fitted out with polypro and wool items, all wrapped in a sweater, and with a light shining on it for warmth (thermoregulation is the most immediate challenge to survival for immature birds).

Celia had a climbing commitment for Saturday, another gorgeous day (she wound up summiting), and I had to do some stuff at work, so I played Daddy Duck for that day. I performed some internet searches to try to figure out what to feed it--again, ideally you're not supposed to feed or medicate immature wild critters, but we figured we were stuck with our little duckling for the weekend, at least, and the available internet info indicated that nestling-stage birds needed to feed every 60-90 minutes. I was also searching the 'net to try to get a fix on the best strategy for returning our ducky to the wild (with half a chance for success, as opposed to just tossing it into the bushes in a neighborhood filled with outdoor cats and not-always-leashed dogs, or plopping it into the Ship Canal with its steady weekend stream of powerboats).

Ducky accompanied me to work. I took along a Ziploc bag containing bread crusts, bran flakes, cracker crumbs, and the like. I alternated between holding it in my hand inside my polypro jacket pocket or letting it peck at a plateful of water and water-soaked food particles. (I still have little ducky tracks all over my acrylic plastic desk-protector as I'm typing this!) Dcuky displayed an endearing and industrious personality, peeping away, "hoovering" up little slurps of water and soaked crumbs, whipping his head from side to side to dismember larger pieces, then immediately chasing after the resulting shower of particles to try to scoop those up too, stretching his body out and waggling his wing-stumps, then curling up in my hand inside the dark, warm pocket, working his way as far upwards as possible (higher up under duck moms presumably representing the safest location, somehat like the penguins continually working their way toward the center of the pack in the "March of the Penguins" movie), placing his delicate and awkward-seeming, but incredibly strong and dexterous, webbed feet on my palm and tucking his mini-beak between my fingers...

Celia returned home from her climb of Baring Peak in mid-evening, in time to “supervise” our feeding and nesting routine, then we tucked the boyo back into his basket again.

On Sunday morning, we had some plans (picking up Celia's thoroughly-pleasant but mildly-demented mom from the adult care place for a planned Mother's Day brunch; I also had a phone appointment to call a young driver-client who wasn't able to talk for extended periods during the workweek due to his job, to prepare him for an upcoming deposition). Our time to re-canvass the area near my house for any further clues was limited, so we ate a quick breakfast, drove back to my neighborhood, and performed a more thorough search.

This further investigation (cue the Dragnet theme, dun dun DUN dun) determined that there was a pair of ducks who did return year after year to an area focused about a block and a half away from my house. The female had indeed been seen heading downhill leading a string of ducklings toward the water on Friday afternoon. Our best guess was that there was probably a hidden nest somewhere deep in the neighborhood vegetation, and that the mama duck would be very unlikely to risk undertaking the perilous multi-block journey to the Ship Canal (across at least two major arterials, one a four-lane wide, 35-mph road, and several other streets, and through the gauntlet of traffic, dogs, cats, and crows), with her entire train of ducklings, more than once in a season.

Obviously, little ducky must've become separated somehow fairly early on during this trek--traffic? dog or cat attack? last in line?--and then wandered west (across the hill) instead of south (downhill), for approximately a block and a half, crossing at least one residential street on the way, a journey that probably took him an hour or two of determined navigation and desperate peep-peeping, before he had come to Celia's attention (which is why the rest of the family was long gone by the time we conducted our initial reconnaisance).

The best chance for success in an "amateur" attempt to reunite a lost duckling with a duck family is during the first 24-36 hours, and involves "smuggling" the baby into a crowd of other ducklings while the parents are distracted. But, though we returned again to the banks of the Ship Canal that Sunday morning, and did sight one mated pair of mallards, there were no little ones in evidence. The male mallard showed zero interest in the peeping of our little guy. The female turned her head in our direction, but kept waddling away whenever we tried to approach. And just turning our little peepster loose on the edge of the four-foot concrete embankment, poised above wave-washed rock rip-rap, on the off chance that the probably-strange female might permit him to approach before he fell off into the rough water, did not seem like a good bet.

Ducky thus spent another day with us, pooping, eating, splashing, getting dried off, getting cuddled, and sleeping or snuggling in pockets or other warm niches. Celia's Mom was extremely sweet and gentle with the duckling--Bridget has capacious hands for a woman (she’s been a lifelong spinner and knitter) in which the duckling felt entirely secure. She sang all the verses of "All Creatures Great and Small" a number of times while cradling our cute little peepster.

We tucked the little boyo in for the night again. When we got up Monday morning, we performed a more diligent job of rounding up and calling all possible phone numbers for animal shelters and similar outfits. The state Wildlife personnel were jerks ("it's not legal for you to keep him"--duh! we're not trying to hand-rear him as a pet, we're trying to turn him over to you!--"oh, just throw him back in the water"--a sure death sentence, lacking an adoptive mamma mallard, as our duckling started becoming hypothermic after only a few minutes of eating and splashing in a quarter inch of water in a plate!--no suggestions for who might be willing to rehab the duckling, a basically worthless tax-wasting bunch of burned-out bureaucrats).

PAWS (the only entry in the phone book that even listed the phrase "wildlife rehabilitation") told us--much more empathetically--that they simply had no more room at the inn for baby ducklings, and that all the likely agencies were probably also full-up with baby ducks, because it was "that time of year,” when ducklings were being herded from nest to water, with the resulting inevitable “attrition." But PAWS did give us the numbers of a couple of wildlife shelter places to try and--while I was in the shower on Monday morning--Celia did hear back from a place up in Arlington, a small town one county north of here, who told her that they'd be "delighted" to take our little duck!

Celia had the day off, so she undertook to drive little ducky up to Arlington. The place involved was Sarvey’s Wildlife Center, which turned out to be the largest wildlife rehabilitation agency in the Northwest. Sarvey’s has been in operation since 1981. They specialize in rehabilitating avian raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, owls), but their five-acre facility houses songbirds, deer, raccoons, seagulls, pigeons, coyotes, squirrels--they handle 3,000 animals a year on a budget of around $200,000, 99% of which goes to animal care and only about 1% toward fund-raising and administration. Ducky went into a pen full of other similar-stage, well-cared-for, and plump-looking ducklings (the property has its own ponds and streams) . Celia took some great photos of eagles, hawks, and owls there.

Of course, in our hearts we miss our little friend, but our minds rest easy, knowing that “our” little ducky is quacking away at this moment, telling his new brothers and sisters all about the virtues of polypro pockets, acrylic desk protectors, and Formica counter-tops (not to mention Bridget’s all-encompassing hands). Doubtless he’s also teaching all his new “siblings” to peep out the tune to “All Creatures Great and Small.”

And that was my weekend of duty as Daddy Duck!